ODD CONNECTIONS

Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, had some interesting remarks about privacy and security. The AP did a story and provided a link to the transcript of his address at the 2007 GEOINT Symposium. Kerr brought up the terrorist bogeyman, just as the Bush Administration does, and mentioned both the attack on our embassies in Africa in 1998 and the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport. He did not make explicit the connection between these events and the current discussion about FISA.

Further, he seemed to be implicitly equating people voluntarily signing up for MySpace or FaceBook to illegal wiretapping by the NSA:

Nowadays, when so much correlated data is collected and available – and I’m just talking about profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube here – the set of identifiable features has grown beyond where most of us can comprehend. We need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment. Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won.

The AP article has what I think is an appropriate response from someone who's concerned with personal privacy:

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that defends online free speech, privacy and intellectual property rights, said Kerr's argument ignores both privacy laws and American history.

"Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms," Opsahl said. "The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. Tying together that someone has spoken out on an issue with their identity is a far more dangerous thing if it is the government that is trying to tie it together."

Opsahl also said Kerr ignores the distinction between sacrificing protection from an intrusive government and voluntarily disclosing information in exchange for a service.

"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties," he said. "We shouldn't have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy."

"It's just another 'trust us, we're the government,'" he said.